


how easy you are to need

by DrowningInStarlight



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Hanahaki Disease, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Pining, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-27 10:20:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20406121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrowningInStarlight/pseuds/DrowningInStarlight
Summary: Tim's coughing again.





	how easy you are to need

**Author's Note:**

> cof 
> 
> title from it will come back by hozier.

Tim was expecting the Operator. He’d been hopping from town to town, driving during the day and locking all the doors at night. It wouldn’t help, he knew, but it was something to do, something to give him the slightest feeling of control over this headlong getaway. 

He’d been planning on finding somewhere new, settling down to try to build something from the wreckage of his life. After all, he’d done it before, hadn’t he? He’d meant to stop running, he really had, but… 

Here he was, still on the road. He’d started over before, but it was different this time. Different because… well. 

He was expecting the Operator. He wasn’t expecting the flowers. 

He was pulled up at the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, taking a smoke break, when the coughing hit. He’d been messing around with Jay’s camera, but he dropped it as he scrambled for his pills, scrambled for a weapon, scrambled to breathe.  _ This is it, it’s caught up with me, _ he thought, but nothing moved. No static flared, nothing vibrated achingly in his teeth. Just the silence of the road and the dusty wind as he coughed and coughed. 

It was only when he could breathe again that he saw the flowers. They were lying on the ground, tiny, blue and delicate. He grabbed them, and struggled to his feet, leaning back against the car for support. 

“Knew I should have quit smoking,” he muttered, staring at them, nestled in his palm so innocently. Like they hadn’t just almost suffocated him out of nowhere. Jay’s camera was still on the ground, and he picked it up as well, carefully dusting off the lense. He pressed buttons at random, suddenly worried, but the screen turned on at once. Jay would have murdered him if he’d broken it. He hated having to think about him in the past tense. 

He felt the flowers tickle at the back of his throat again, but he swallowed them down. He couldn’t stay here, not out in the open. He tried not to think about Jay as he drove. 

He googled the flowers when he got to a hotel that night. Forget-me-nots. Well, that was a little on the nose, he thought, but apparently whatever god had cursed him now didn’t think so. The carpet was littered with petals by the time he left the next morning. 

  
  


He left the flowers in the woods. Not  _ those  _ woods. Rosswood Park didn’t get to claim any more of Jay than it already had, these woods were peaceful, shot through with sunlight. He wondered if Jay would have liked it. It wasn’t like Tim had a choice, really, it wasn’t like Jay had a-- there wasn’t anywhere else to leave them, but he couldn’t just throw them away. He couldn’t. They didn’t belong to him, really, they were for Jay but Jay was  _ gone  _ and he  _ couldn’t just throw them away, _ not when they reminded him so desperately of everything he’d lost. It was a self fulfilling prophecy, he stared at the flowers and thought of Jay and coughed, coughed, coughed, coughed until he choked on blue petals and memories. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, throwing down the flowers more forcefully than he intended at the base of a slender tree on the outskirts of the woods. He could hear a stream, somewhere nearby, babbling over stones undisturbed. No static. Good. Jay deserved better than that. “God, Jay, I’m so-- I’m so sorry, man. I couldn’t-- I couldn’t help you, or even be with you when--” 

The flowers began to rise in his throat again, he could feel the roots tightening around his lungs, and god. He didn’t care. Jay was fucking dead, of course he didn’t fucking care-- 

The coughing crashed over him like a wave. He thought it was just the flowers, but just to be safe-- and fuck, if he hadn’t learnt better safe than sorry by this point he deserved to be murdered-- he grabbed Jay’s camera case out of his bag. He’s started keeping the camera in the case since he’d nearly broken it when the flowers had first nearly killed him. It was stupid (Jay’s dead, he reminded himself,  _ Jay’s dead)  _ but if the camera breaks, that’s it. His last connection snapped. 

As he opened it, fingers shaking, something fluttered out. He picked it up, unfolding it-- a little slip of paper, a receipt for food or something printed on one side. On the back, though, in Jay’s sprawling handwriting, _ getting dinner, come find me if I’m not back in ten.  _ There’s no name, but Tim knew better than to expect that. Jay had stopped signing his name pretty early on in their little paranoia road trip, but Tim looked closer and sure enough, there it was. A little smiley face, entirely nondescript except for the tiny scribbled hat it was wearing.

The tears burned Tim’s eyes, even as his throat burned from hacking up flowers. 

“I’m sorry,” he said again. _ I love you,  _ he didn’t say, because it was too late for that. It had  _ always  _ been too late for that. His mouth tasted of blood. 

He stayed until it got dark. He left the note with the flowers, got back in the car, and began to drive. He didn’t know where. He didn’t care. 

The petals continued to fall. 

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> come find me on tumblr at drowinginstarlights!


End file.
